Al Gore's Assault on Town Hall
I love Al Gore and I was really looking forward to seeing him talk at Town Hall on Monday night, but I was under no illusions that I would get to see him announce that he was running for President. I fell for that one before. When Barack Obama came through town on a book tour I got in a blood-boiling, fist-pumping frenzy for some kind of announcement, but what I got was a tepid book tour speech that was more brains than brawn. Same thing Monday night, except this time I knew what I was getting into. Besides, no politician (or “recovering politician” as Gore referred to himself) is going to make a major announcement in the latte-sippin’, Volvo-drivin’, tree-humpin’ Pacific Northwest. Sorry, Seattle.
Usually Seattlest isn’t about the press box--the cheap seats are more our bag--but even though he obviously didn’t intend to make any grand announcements it’s still Al fucking Gore and it sold out in ten minutes. If it takes sitting with the typists to see him talk, whatever. He came out and fired off a bunch of self-effacing jokes, while looking way in command of the stage. Self-effacement doesn’t work a hundred percent when you’ve got Town Hall packed with hundreds of faithful who’ll hastily produce their first-born on your command (and I think some people in the press section even had their kids on hand just in case). He immediately went into the climate change thing and then from there into talking about the truth. “Sooner or later the truth will come riding to the rescue,” he said someone else said.
At this point (or at least at this point in my notes) the LaRouche choir breaks in and starts singing in the middle of the room. I’m pretty sure that’s not the truth Al had in mind. After they were swept peaceably from the hall Gore continued on his truth theme: Philosophy, the printing press, the facts, Relativity, the Ecology of Information, “truth force”... It got real lecturey and if the Stranger guys weren’t typing so furiously behind me here I may have started dozing. “Common Sense is the Harry Potter of the 18th Century.” He was talking about the printing press and the democratization of information that followed its invention, but then he jumps forward to the radio how the Nazis used it and then on to television and the evils lurking therein, but Al’s not so much mad as hell here as, like...unamused.
Communications technology in this speech had already gone from bad to good and back to bad again when he started employing the crowd as punctuation to his pop culture scolding. “Fuck K-Fed!” he said and everyone went nuts. Yeah, right. But he did say that K-Fed and Lindsay and Brothers and Sisters are “crowding out the space we need to govern ourselves” which did get a proper reception. Right on, Al.
At this point I remember glancing around for a nearby exit because it seemed like Gore was going to start pointing at the media seats at any moment. “I’m not with these guys! I just snuck in here! Uh, go La-Rooouche!” But he flipped it again and started talking about the importance of protecting the neutrality of the internet. He seemed really passionate about this, and maybe it’s my own guilty conscience talking here, but I swear I could detect an undercurrent of Al saying “I’ll work on keeping the internet free and open, but you damn well better come up with something better to talk about than fucking K-Fed.” I think the point of all this was that media in the hands of people results in the truth and media in the hands of businesses results in piles of money. Scrolls=bad, governed by monks. Books=kinda good, kinda governed by the people who own em, but at least there are a few of them out there. Newspapers=good. Television=the devil. The internet=remains to be seen. Hopefully this is clearer in the book, which I didn’t buy. I always buy the book and then I never read it. Hopefully this time I didn’t buy it, but I end up reading it.
I don’t think he’s going to run, though, and I’m not sure but maybe I hope he doesn’t. Seems like he can do a lot of good doing what he’s doing. More good. There weren’t many questions from the audience (thank god) but the best one came from a guy who was sitting next to David Goldstein in the press seats. He asked how Al can be so big on the environment now, even claiming to be behind it for the past thirty years, while the Clinton administration really didn’t do shit on that front. Well, Al answered, it was the Clinton administration and not the Gore administration and then we lost Congress and, ok, any other questions? I’m not the kind to shout stuff out, but I wanted to say, “But Al! Your Presidential campaign didn’t really focus on the environment either. Actually, it wasn’t an issue in that election at all. Was that Congress’s fault? Or Clinton’s?” But instead I went home, wrote this, and bought The Assault on Reason from Amazon.
Other perspectives at:
The Stranger
The Weekly
P-I
Seattle Times
NPI
